I started this blog with the default theme, but after a few articles I think it is time for a more practical theme. My preference is that the base page shows on overvew of the blog posts. Readers can then click on "Read More" if they find it interesting.
Finding a pelican theme
It turns out that there is a community managed set of themes with nice screenshots to browse. These can be obtained from github.
Getting a local copy is easy:
# cd ~/src/blog/hans.fernhout.info
# git clone https://github.com/getpelican/pelican-themes
This will create a subdirectory pelican-themes, which contains all the themes.
Testing a theme
Testing a theme is easy:
# pelican content -t pelican-themes/gum && pelican --listen
Which will (re)generate all pages and serve them at http://localhost:8000.
After playing around with it I chose ''gum'' as the nicest one: nice and clean, fast, and providing nice summaries.
Writing summaries
The preview of an article is wat is desclared as the summary. For this article: 'I started this blog with the default theme, but after a few articles I think it is time for a more practical template.'.
Slugs
Never knew what they were. Turns out they are the distinghuising part of the URL. It is probably a good idea to avpid spaces in a slug then.
Google ranking
Completely irrelevant for this blog. However it is interesting to figure it out. In the end, I do not mind if these pages are found on the Internet.
I looked at Google's 'Search Console'. Turns out that my pages were not indexed at all. Probably because no one refers to my blog. But it is possible to tell Google to index my blog. It takes a while but there are some results after a few days.
The positive news is that my pages are okay for desktop and for mobile use, so good job Pelican.
The obvious thing that needed to be improved is that there were some duplicated pages. I blame that on the theme used. It should be better now since I use this new theme.